For Your Consideration

Modern Farmer, My Last Days and @HuffPoSpoilers

If you’ve ever imagined yourself as a green-thumbed animal whisperer, living a simpler, bucolic life, eschewing Monsanto and Tyson, cultivating your backyard and raising a brood of cage-free hens without giving up your urban homestead, Modern Farmer can help you get started. The new magazine, which hit newsstands in April, fills a niche for the eco-friendly and fashionable gastronomiques among us — or at least, the aspirational ones. The glossy and its website cover the local food movement through an international lens with a sometimes alarmist slant. Who knew that a common farm fertilizer was often used in meth manufacturing or that run-off from Greek yogurt production kills thousands of fish each year?

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WEB SERIES

There’s a YouTube video taking over my Facebook newsfeed: It shows a young man dying from a rare bone cancer. His family and loved ones make his final days on Earth his best ones: His dad rents his son’s favorite car and the young man cruises down the freeway. Celebrities like Ed Helms and Rachel Bilson even make cameos (but I won’t give everything away). This is the true story of Zach Sobiech, a Minnesotan who died at the age 18 of osteosarcoma last week. Actor Rainn Wilson’s media company SoulPancake released the 22-minute YouTube documentary after his death, the most recent video from SoulPancake’s “My Last Days” web series, a collection of mini-docs that tell stories of real people with incurable illnesses.

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TWITTER

Is there ANYTHING that grosses Ke$ha out? Wait, how old is Ginger Spice? Is this the worst movie idea ever? George Lopez stole what from George W. Bush? You’ll never believe what’s going on with Jennifer Aniston’s wedding! Rihanna wants to make out with which female pop star? If like me, you are one of Huffington Post’s three million Twitter followers daily subjected to its evil viral marketing tactics, there is an antidote: @HuffPoSpoilers takes the website’s most inane, click-baity tweets and answers the pressing questions you’re too busy and/or ashamed to find the answer to. (Rihanna, by the way, would share a kiss with Miley Cyrus, and yes, Angry Birds is probably the worst movie idea this century.)